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He Took Her Trust - How a Pastor Stole a Widow's Life Savings · Narcisist Psychology

0:03
Speaker 1: A single tan sneaker sat dry in a flooded drainage
0:07
Speaker 1: ditch at five forty seven in the morning, June eleventh,
0:10
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen. The ditch beside Aldermore Road held an inch
0:15
Speaker 1: of standing water from the previous night's rain. The shoe
0:19
Speaker 1: had not absorbed a drop inside. The tongue written in
0:23
Speaker 1: black sharpie s Mills Clifford Hanson had been running that
0:27
Speaker 1: same route for three years. He knew the ditch, he
0:31
Speaker 1: knew the water. He crouched down and looked at that
0:34
Speaker 1: shoe for a long moment before he called the police,
0:37
Speaker 1: because even he could tell that something about it was wrong.
0:40
Speaker 1: A shoe doesn't stay dry in a flooded ditch over night,
0:44
Speaker 1: not unless it arrived there after the rain stopped, not
0:47
Speaker 1: unless someone put it there or threw it there in
0:50
Speaker 1: a hurry. What Hanson couldn't know yet was that the
0:53
Speaker 1: woman whose name was written inside that shoe had been
0:56
Speaker 1: systematically dismantled, piece by piece over twe twenty eight months,
1:01
Speaker 1: her money, her sense of reality, her trust in the
1:04
Speaker 1: one person she had let all the way in. And
1:08
Speaker 1: the person who did it had a pastoral counseling certificate
1:11
Speaker 1: and an office two blocks from where that shoe landed.
1:14
Speaker 1: Sherry Mills was forty eight years old in the spring
1:17
Speaker 1: of two thousand nineteen, and she had been carrying her
1:21
Speaker 1: grief quietly for seven years. Her husband, Gerald, died in
1:25
Speaker 1: two thousand twelve. He left behind two children, a modest
1:29
Speaker 1: insurance payout, and a savings account that Cherry kept separate
1:33
Speaker 1: from everything else. Not out of secrecy, exactly went out
1:37
Speaker 1: of caution. She was the kind of woman who kept
1:40
Speaker 1: her own records straight. She had worked as a records
1:44
Speaker 1: coordinator at Belhaven Regional Medical Center for sixteen years. Precision
1:49
Speaker 1: was not just her skill, it was her nature. She
1:53
Speaker 1: lived on Dunmore Road in Belhaven, Tennessee. Her neighbor Phyllis Greer,
1:58
Speaker 1: passed her house every morning at six thirty, same as always,
2:01
Speaker 1: and Sherry's routines matched. The porch light off by seven,
2:05
Speaker 1: the car in the carpet, the side gate closed. Her daughter, Nadia,
2:10
Speaker 1: was twenty six and living in Knoxville. They spoke every
2:14
Speaker 1: Wednesday at eleven fifteen at night, without fail, Sherry would call,
2:19
Speaker 1: Nadia would pick up. They would talk for sometimes an hour.
2:24
Speaker 1: Nadia later described it as the most reliable thing in
2:28
Speaker 1: her week. Her son, Preston, was twenty three, an electrical
2:32
Speaker 1: apprentice in Nashville. He knew his mother worked hard and
2:37
Speaker 1: kept to herself since Gerald died. He did not know
2:40
Speaker 1: about the savings account. Neither of them did. That account
2:43
Speaker 1: was the thread that connected everything. Sherry had disclosed it
2:47
Speaker 1: in a counseling session in the spring of twenty seventeen
2:50
Speaker 1: to a man named Duane Watson, because Watson had asked
2:54
Speaker 1: her to tell him what she was afraid of losing.
2:58
Speaker 1: She told him about the anxiety she could couldn't shake
3:00
Speaker 1: since Gerald's death. She told him about the money she
3:04
Speaker 1: had set aside quietly for her own security. She told him,
3:08
Speaker 1: because that was the point of counseling. You tell the
3:11
Speaker 1: truth so someone can help you carry it. Watson listened carefully,
3:16
Speaker 1: he always did. He was fifty three, the director of
3:19
Speaker 1: congregational care at Calvary Ridge Community Fellowship, which was where
3:24
Speaker 1: Sherry had been referred after Gerald died. He held a
3:28
Speaker 1: pastoral counseling certificate. He had served as a lay counselor
3:32
Speaker 1: from two thousy thirteen through twenty sixteen. He wore the
3:36
Speaker 1: language of ministry easily, words like healing, trust, spiritual discipline
3:42
Speaker 1: and stewardship. The twice weekly sessions began in February of
3:46
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen. By spring, Sherry was opening up about things
3:52
Speaker 1: she had told no one else. By summer, Watson had
3:55
Speaker 1: begun framing a request. There was, he explained, an in
4:00
Speaker 1: formal fund, a pooled resource for congregants in need, a quiet,
4:04
Speaker 1: faithful practice, no paperwork, no records, just an act of
4:09
Speaker 1: trust between members of a community. Would Sherry consider contributing.
4:14
Speaker 1: She did. The first withdrawal was modest, then came another
4:19
Speaker 1: and another. Over the next twenty two months, Sherry made
4:23
Speaker 1: twenty two cash withdrawals from that account, ranging from four
4:27
Speaker 1: hundred to six hundred dollars each. Fourteen of those withdrawals
4:31
Speaker 1: happened within forty eight hours of a counseling session. The
4:35
Speaker 1: amounts never crossed the threshold that would trigger automatic bank reporting.
4:39
Speaker 1: That was not a coincidence. The total came to just
4:42
Speaker 1: over eighteen thousand dollars, drawn from an account her children
4:47
Speaker 1: didn't know existed, given to a man who had no
4:50
Speaker 1: documentation of any counseling fund in any church record. But
4:54
Speaker 1: the money was only part of what Watson took in
4:57
Speaker 1: the fall of twenty eighteen, Phyllis Greer began noticing something small.
5:01
Speaker 1: The side gate at Sherry's house, the one that opened
5:04
Speaker 1: onto the car port, was standing open. Not every day,
5:08
Speaker 1: but often, about a dozen times over eight months. She
5:12
Speaker 1: would walk past at six thirty in the morning and
5:15
Speaker 1: the gate would be ajar. She mentioned it to no one.
5:18
Speaker 1: It seemed like a small thing. It wasn't. The car
5:22
Speaker 1: port side door was a hollow corps door with a
5:25
Speaker 1: push button lock. According to later investigation, it could be
5:29
Speaker 1: opened with a credit card in approximately six seconds. Sherry
5:33
Speaker 1: had never thought of it as a real entrance. She
5:35
Speaker 1: didn't use it herself. Watson had been using it. What
5:39
Speaker 1: he was doing inside, what he was looking for, what
5:42
Speaker 1: he cataloged from those visits. That picture would come into
5:46
Speaker 1: focus later after a runner found a dry shoe in
5:49
Speaker 1: a flooded ditch and a daughter's phone rang on a
5:52
Speaker 1: Wednesday night and no one picked up. The shoe was
5:56
Speaker 1: the first impossible thing. Clifford Hansen ran the same route
6:00
Speaker 1: every morning. On June eleventh, twenty nineteen, at five forty
6:05
Speaker 1: seven in the morning, he slowed near a drainage ditch
6:08
Speaker 1: behind the Aldermoor Counseling offices. Something pale was wedged against
6:13
Speaker 1: a chain link fence at the ditch's edge. He stopped.
6:16
Speaker 1: It was a tan orthopedic sneaker, size seven velcro closure.
6:21
Speaker 1: Written in black sharpie on the inside tongue s Mills.
6:26
Speaker 1: The ditch had flooded overnight. Everything in it was water locked, gravel, leaves,
6:31
Speaker 1: a crumpled receipt. The shoe was dry. That detail would
6:36
Speaker 1: mean nothing for several hours, Then it would mean everything.
6:40
Speaker 1: Police arrived at the house on Dunmore Road by eight
6:44
Speaker 1: in the morning. No answer at the front door, no
6:47
Speaker 1: car in the driveway, nothing visibly wrong. They took a
6:51
Speaker 1: report and noted the shoe. What they didn't know yet
6:55
Speaker 1: was that Sherry Mills had not been in that house
6:58
Speaker 1: since early in the morning of June tenth, and the
7:01
Speaker 1: shoe had not fallen there. It had been thrown. Nadia
7:05
Speaker 1: Mills had called her mother every Wednesday at eleven fifteen
7:08
Speaker 1: in the evening for years. The call on June fifth
7:11
Speaker 1: had been normal. Sherry sounded tired, maybe a little flat,
7:16
Speaker 1: but nothing that alarmed her daughter. The call on June
7:19
Speaker 1: eleventh never happened. Nadia's phone rang through to voicemail. She
7:24
Speaker 1: called again, and again. By the next morning, she had
7:28
Speaker 1: filed a missing person's report. Six days after that, she
7:32
Speaker 1: hired a private investigator named Clifford Allen, fifty one years old,
7:37
Speaker 1: a forensic financial consultant who had spent two decades untangling
7:41
Speaker 1: exactly the kind of quiet damage that leaves no visible wound.
7:46
Speaker 1: Allan didn't start with the shoe. He started with the account.
7:50
Speaker 1: Nadia had not known the account existed. Preston hadn't either.
7:55
Speaker 1: It was a modest savings account Sherry had opened after
7:58
Speaker 1: Gerald died in two thousand twelve, a private reserve insulated
8:02
Speaker 1: from grief, something no one needed to know about. Between
8:06
Speaker 1: August twenty seventeen and May two thousand nineteen, that account
8:12
Speaker 1: had been visited twenty two times. The withdrawals ranged from
8:16
Speaker 1: four hundred to six hundred dollars each. The total was
8:20
Speaker 1: just over eighteen thousand dollars. Fourteen of those withdrawals happened
8:25
Speaker 1: within forty eight hours of a counseling session with Dwayne Watson,
8:29
Speaker 1: not twelve, not fifteen, fourteen out of twenty two, and
8:34
Speaker 1: every single withdrawal stayed below the threshold that would trigger
8:39
Speaker 1: automatic bank reporting. The calibration was precise too precise to
8:44
Speaker 1: be accidental. Allen pulled Watson's bank records through legal process.
8:50
Speaker 1: The cash deposits matched Sherry's withdrawal amounts. They matched the dates.
8:56
Speaker 1: The pattern was not a coincidence. It was a ledger.
8:59
Speaker 1: Watson had presented the payments as contributions to an informal
9:03
Speaker 1: counseling fund, a pooled resource for congregants in need, He'd said,
9:08
Speaker 1: a quiet act of generosity. When investigators checked every church
9:12
Speaker 1: document Cavalry Ridge Community Fellowship had produced in six years,
9:17
Speaker 1: the fund did not appear, not once, no record, no disbursements,
9:22
Speaker 1: no receipts. The money had gone from Sherry's account to
9:26
Speaker 1: Watson's account and stopped there. But Alan had also found
9:29
Speaker 1: something else. A name. Loretta Marsh, forty four years old,
9:33
Speaker 1: had been a member of Cavalry Ridge before Sherry. She
9:37
Speaker 1: had also entered counseling with Watson. Over fourteen months, she
9:42
Speaker 1: had withdrawn approximately nine thousand dollars under a nearly identical arrangement,
9:48
Speaker 1: the same framing, the same informal fund, the same explanation.
9:53
Speaker 1: At some point during that period, Marsh had discovered that
9:56
Speaker 1: Watson had been inside her home. He had gone through
9:59
Speaker 1: her document she had said nothing. She had not reported it.
10:04
Speaker 1: When Allan found her and she agreed to speak, one
10:07
Speaker 1: phrase she used stayed in the record. He made it
10:11
Speaker 1: feel like a spiritual discipline. That phrase is the mechanism,
10:15
Speaker 1: not a flaw in the victim's judgment, a tool in
10:19
Speaker 1: the manipulator's design. There was a fingerprint that almost no
10:23
Speaker 1: one would have noticed on the flat interior surface of
10:26
Speaker 1: Sherry's laundry robe door near the hinge. Not the handle,
10:30
Speaker 1: not the frame, but the flat panel near the hinge.
10:34
Speaker 1: Investigators found Watson's fingerprint, a print left by someone pulling
10:38
Speaker 1: a door quietly shut from inside a room they were
10:42
Speaker 1: not supposed to be in. Think about that placement for
10:44
Speaker 1: a moment. A person leaving in a hurry grabs the handle.
10:49
Speaker 1: A person leaving carefully, trying not to make a sound,
10:53
Speaker 1: pushes from the flat panel near the hinge. It is
10:57
Speaker 1: a slower, quieter way to close a door. It is
11:01
Speaker 1: the way you close a door when someone might be
11:03
Speaker 1: asleep in the next room. Watson had been in that house,
11:06
Speaker 1: He had been careful, and he had left one print
11:09
Speaker 1: in exactly the wrong place. In Watson's car when it
11:12
Speaker 1: was searched after his arrest, investigators found a burner phone.
11:17
Speaker 1: The texts on it were brief and operational. They described
11:20
Speaker 1: a timeline for moving Sherry. They referenced a location, a
11:24
Speaker 1: rural property forty miles east of Bellhaven. The property belonged
11:29
Speaker 1: to Brenda Salt, Watson's cousin. Sherry had been there since
11:32
Speaker 1: June tenth. When the picture finally assembled itself. The withdrawn cash,
11:37
Speaker 1: the silent home visits, the meticulous withdrawal calibration, the finger
11:41
Speaker 1: print on the hinge, the burner phone. A new question arrived,
11:46
Speaker 1: the shoe. Watson had been careful about almost everything. The
11:50
Speaker 1: counseling fun story was constructed over months. The withdrawals were
11:54
Speaker 1: engineered to avoid detection. The car port entrance was chosen
11:58
Speaker 1: because Sherry didn't think of it as a door, He
12:01
Speaker 1: had a cousin with a rural property, he had a
12:04
Speaker 1: burner phone, and then he threw a shoe out of
12:07
Speaker 1: a car window. According to the investigation, the shoe came
12:10
Speaker 1: off during or just after Sherry was moved through the
12:14
Speaker 1: carport entrance and placed in Watson's vehicle at some point
12:18
Speaker 1: during the drive near a red light close to the
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Speaker 1: Aldermore counseling offices. Watson threw the shoe from the car.
12:25
Speaker 1: It landed dry in a ditch that would flood over
12:28
Speaker 1: night with rain. He threw it because it was there,
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Speaker 1: and he panicked. Twenty eight months of methodical construction and
12:35
Speaker 1: a single shoe undone by a moment of nerves at
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Speaker 1: a red light. The ditch flooded. The shoe stayed dry
12:42
Speaker 1: against the fence. A runner stopped at five forty seven
12:45
Speaker 1: in the morning and read the name on the tongue
12:48
Speaker 1: that is the hinge. The whole case turns on picture
12:52
Speaker 1: the counseling office. On a Tuesday afternoon in the spring
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Speaker 1: of twenty seventeen, Sherry Mills sits across from Dwayne Watson.
13:00
Speaker 1: She has been referred by her church. She is fifty
13:03
Speaker 1: six days past the second anniversary of her husband's death.
13:07
Speaker 1: She is anxious about money, a specific private anxiety about
13:12
Speaker 1: a savings account. She has never told her children about them.
13:16
Speaker 1: She tells Watson in that room in that moment. She
13:20
Speaker 1: does not hand him a weapon. She believes she is
13:23
Speaker 1: in a confession. She believes the information stays there. That
13:28
Speaker 1: is the first assumption Watson needs her to make. The
13:31
Speaker 1: alternative to this version is the only other scenario. The
13:34
Speaker 1: evidence permits that Watson's interest in Sherry was opportunistic rather
13:39
Speaker 1: than targeted, that he ran the same spiritual discipline framing
13:43
Speaker 1: with every counseling client, and Sherry was simply the one
13:47
Speaker 1: who happened to have savings. Loretta Marsh's case makes this
13:51
Speaker 1: version difficult to dismiss. Watson used identical language with Marsh
13:56
Speaker 1: fourteen months before Sherry ever walked through his door. But
14:00
Speaker 1: that version collapses the moment you look at the withdrawal rhythm.
14:04
Speaker 1: The fourteen withdrawals within forty eight hours of sessions are
14:08
Speaker 1: not the behavior of a man running a general scheme.
14:11
Speaker 1: They are the behavior of a man who knows when
14:14
Speaker 1: his subject is most susceptible. The sessions created the vulnerability.
14:18
Speaker 1: The withdrawal followed within two days while the conditioning was
14:22
Speaker 1: still active. That is not opportunism. That is sequencing. So
14:26
Speaker 1: picture the carport door at two in the morning on
14:29
Speaker 1: June tenth. Watson knows the lock, he has been through
14:34
Speaker 1: it before. The finger print on the hinge says, so
14:38
Speaker 1: he knows Sherry won't hear him enter. He knows from
14:41
Speaker 1: twenty eight months of sessions what she fears and what
14:44
Speaker 1: she trusts. The evidence does not support a theory of
14:48
Speaker 1: spontaneous escalation. The burner phone, coordinating transport, the prior arrangement
14:53
Speaker 1: with Brenda Salt, those require planning that began before June tenth.
14:58
Speaker 1: The financial extraction had been winding down. The final withdrawal
15:03
Speaker 1: was June ninth, one day before Sherry was moved. That
15:07
Speaker 1: sequence is what the jury heard. Watson admitted in questioning
15:11
Speaker 1: that he had accepted money and entered the home. He
15:15
Speaker 1: denied intent to harm. The jury deliberated for six hours
15:19
Speaker 1: and returned four counts, two for elder financial exploitation, one
15:25
Speaker 1: for unlawful restraint, one for criminal confinement nineteen years. The
15:30
Speaker 1: strongest reading of the evidence is also the one that
15:33
Speaker 1: recontextualizes every quiet Tuesday afternoon in that counseling office. Watson
15:39
Speaker 1: wasn't counseling Sherry. He was building a file. Every anxiety
15:43
Speaker 1: she named, every fear she surfaced, every detail about the
15:47
Speaker 1: account her children didn't know existed. He was cataloging it.
15:52
Speaker 1: The sessions were not the treatment, They were the intake process.
15:57
Speaker 1: The shoe landed dry in a flooded ditch because us
16:00
Speaker 1: one moment of panic interrupted twenty eight months of patience.
16:04
Speaker 1: Sherry Mills was found on June nineteenth, two thy nineteen,
16:09
Speaker 1: a rural property forty miles east of Bellhaven. She was disoriented.
16:15
Speaker 1: She was dehydrated. She had been in the care of
16:17
Speaker 1: Brenda Salt, Watson's cousin for nine days. The property was
16:22
Speaker 1: not listed under Watson's name. It took the combination of
16:26
Speaker 1: p I. Clifford Allen's financial mapping and Detective Sandra Chu's
16:30
Speaker 1: field work to locate it. When investigators arrived, Sherry did
16:35
Speaker 1: not immediately understand what was happening. That detail, the disorientation
16:40
Speaker 1: is not a minor footnote. It is the end point
16:43
Speaker 1: of twenty eight months of systematic erosion. A woman who
16:47
Speaker 1: coordinated medical records for sixteen years, who raised two children
16:51
Speaker 1: after losing her husband, who answered her daughter's calls every
16:55
Speaker 1: Wednesday at eleven fifteen without fail. She had been reduced
16:59
Speaker 1: to a state where reality itself felt unstable. Watson was
17:04
Speaker 1: brought in for questioning on June twenty third. He gave
17:07
Speaker 1: a partial confession. He admitted accepting money, He admitted entering
17:11
Speaker 1: the home. He denied intent to harm. That denial is
17:15
Speaker 1: worth sitting with, not because it is obviously true or
17:19
Speaker 1: obviously false, but because it is the last instrument in
17:22
Speaker 1: the same toolkit he used throughout. Watson's entire method depended
17:26
Speaker 1: on reframing. Every payment was a contribution, Every home entry
17:31
Speaker 1: was pastoral concern. The denial of harm is the same
17:35
Speaker 1: move name it differently, soften the frame and let the
17:39
Speaker 1: listener fill in the gaps with something more comfortable than
17:42
Speaker 1: the truth. The jury did not fill them in that way.
17:46
Speaker 1: Six hours of deliberation, four counts returned, two for elder
17:51
Speaker 1: financial exploitation, one for unlawful restraint, one for criminal confinement
17:57
Speaker 1: nineteen years. The financial record was precise enough that no
18:02
Speaker 1: ambiguity survived the court room. Twenty two withdraws fourteen within
18:08
Speaker 1: forty eight hours of sessions. The amounts calibrated below the
18:12
Speaker 1: federal reporting threshold. Cash deposits into Watson's account matching Sherry's
18:17
Speaker 1: withdrawal dates to the day. A burner phone with texts
18:21
Speaker 1: coordinating transport. Fingerprints on the flat of the laundry room
18:25
Speaker 1: door near the hinge not a casual placement, the placement
18:30
Speaker 1: of someone pulling a door quietly shut. Loretta Marsh came
18:33
Speaker 1: forward during the investigation. She had withdrawn approximately nine thousand
18:38
Speaker 1: dollars over fourteen months under the same framing, contributions to
18:42
Speaker 1: an informal counseling fund that existed nowhere in Cavalry Ridge's records.
18:47
Speaker 1: She had discovered Watson had been through her documents, she
18:51
Speaker 1: had not reported it. According to investigator's accounts, She described
18:55
Speaker 1: not being certain anyone would believe her. That is the
18:59
Speaker 1: part of this case that extends beyond Cherry Mills. Watson's
19:02
Speaker 1: method worked because it operated inside a space that people
19:06
Speaker 1: are conditioned to trust, a counselor a church, a pastoral
19:11
Speaker 1: care program. The sessions were private by design, the fund
19:15
Speaker 1: was informal by design. The entries into the home were
19:19
Speaker 1: quiet by design. Every structural choice served the same purpose
19:25
Speaker 1: make the arrangement look like care until it was too
19:29
Speaker 1: late to question it. Cherry Mills returned to work at
19:33
Speaker 1: Bellhaven Regional Medical Center. She resumed the Wednesday, eleven, fifteen
19:37
Speaker 1: calls with Nadia. Those two sentences carry more weight than
19:41
Speaker 1: they might appear to. After twenty eight months of someone
19:45
Speaker 1: methodically narrowing her world, extracting her savings, mapping her fears,
19:50
Speaker 1: entering her home without her knowledge, and finally removing her
19:54
Speaker 1: entirely from her own life. She came back, She went
19:58
Speaker 1: back to the building where she had worked for sixteen years.
20:01
Speaker 1: She picked up the phone on Wednesday night. There is
20:04
Speaker 1: something in this case that resists easy categorization. Watson was
20:09
Speaker 1: not a stranger. He was someone Sherry was referred to
20:12
Speaker 1: by her own church. She sat across from him in
20:15
Speaker 1: a counseling office and told him what she was afraid of,
20:18
Speaker 1: what she owed, what she had managed to save after
20:21
Speaker 1: her husband died. She trusted him with the architecture of
20:25
Speaker 1: her private life, and he used every piece of it.
20:28
Speaker 1: The forensic financial record made the extraction visible. The burner
20:32
Speaker 1: phone made the coordination visible. The fingerprint made the home
20:36
Speaker 1: intrusions visible. But what is harder to document, and what
20:40
Speaker 1: the twenty eight month timeline makes undeniable, is the deliberate,
20:44
Speaker 1: patient dismantling of another person's sense of reality. The forged
20:48
Speaker 1: audit letter, the fabricated debt, the call to Nadia designed
20:53
Speaker 1: to preempt her concern. These were not reactions to circumstances.
20:58
Speaker 1: They were constructed. Watson built the world Sherry experienced in
21:03
Speaker 1: those final months. He built it to keep her still
21:07
Speaker 1: a tan orthopedic sneaker landed in a drainage ditch at
21:10
Speaker 1: five forty seven in the morning. Dry in a flooded ditch,
21:15
Speaker 1: size seven belcro closures. Name written inside the tongue in
21:19
Speaker 1: black sharpie. It should not have been dry. It should
21:22
Speaker 1: not have been there. Clifford Hansen saw it on his
21:25
Speaker 1: morning run and stopped. That shoe is the reason this
21:29
Speaker 1: story has an ending instead of an absence. Sherry Mills
21:33
Speaker 1: is fifty one years old. Now she works. She answers
21:37
Speaker 1: her daughter's calls. The Wednesday night ritual that Watson tried
21:41
Speaker 1: to preempt, first by poisoning her relationship with Nadia, then
21:46
Speaker 1: by removing her entirely survived. That is not a small thing.
21:51
Speaker 1: It is the only thing that actually matters. This show
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Speaker 1: is made by Obo Media.